Authors:

Sota Yanagisawa

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About Paper:

Bio-inspired flapping-wing aerial vehicles (FWAVs) offer agility and maneuverability advantages in environments where conventional UAVs struggle. However, their unsteady and nonlinear aerodynamic behavior introduces substantial complications in modeling and stability analysis, leading to challenges in early-stage design. This necessitates the need for experimental methods to elucidate the unsteady aerodynamics of FWAVs. Moreover, the static stability of such aircraft must be understood to inform further development of such unconventional platforms. This study investigates the aerodynamics and static stability of a custom- designed FWAV, BoilerBird 2, with flapping and gliding capabilities using both computational and experimental methods. The gliding characteristics are studied using computational methods and validated experimentally, while the flapping mode is studied solely through experiments. For the gliding phase, the aircraft geometry is modeled in XFLR5, and aerodynamic and stability parameters are predicted using panel and vortex lattice methods, informing the final aircraft configuration. Wind tunnel experiments are conducted to measure the aerodynamic and stability characteristics of the FWAV. Experimental data is gathered for the flapping stage and the gliding stage by mounting the model on a 3-component force balance and acquiring force and moment data over a range of angles of attack. The results are used to evaluate the reliability of XFLR5 for early-stage design of FWAVs in the gliding stage. This work contributes to the growing body of research in FWAV development and demonstrates a viable methodology for early- stage aerodynamics and static stability analysis. Future work will develop a computational methodology for dynamic and flapping flight modeling. Keywords: Flapping Wing Aircraft; Aerodynamics; Wind Tunnel Testing; Stability Analysis; Biomimicry

Source:

Purdue University / 2025

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Co-authors:

Sota Yanagisawa